DIGGING THE IMPERIAL CANALDIGGING THE IMPERIAL CANAL
The range has yet an open field many miles before it comes to the Colorado River. When the hills reach that point they will disappear, for the waters of that mighty stream will bear the shifting sands away toward the sea.
In the southwestern portion of the desert, one hundred miles across the plain from the Walking Hills, nature has dealt in geometrical figures on an extensive scale.
The plain, at this point, is composed of claylike soil, very hard and firm, unlike that of the surrounding desert, which is loose and sandy. The clay section is smooth as macadam, and is level save for the geometrical figures which are found thereon in relief.
From beyond the clay-paved section the winds have brought the light, loose particles of soil and have piled them up in crescent-shaped hills at various places about the plain. The hills vary in size but not in shape. Each mound is as true a crescent as is the new moon, or as could be constructed by the mostskillful landscape gardener. The proportions are carefully preserved in the various mounds.
The horns of the crescents all point eastward. The winds all blow from the west. Like the Walking Hills, they travel slowly across the plain, preserving their shape and proportions but growing a little taller, a little broader, and a little thicker as they go, because of the new material which is continually being brought across the plain by the constructive winds.
There is, no doubt, some good and sufficient natural cause for this peculiar construction. Some unalterable law of nature is probably being followed in the shaping of these sand-heaps, but thus far no one has been able to offer an explanation for this remarkable freak of the winds.
IMPERIAL CHURCH—FIRST WOODEN BUILDING IN LOWER COLORADO DESERTIMPERIAL CHURCH—FIRST WOODEN BUILDING IN LOWER COLORADO DESERT
Footnote:[1]"Pegleg" Smith was a brother of the famous trapper, Jedediah Smith.
Footnote:[1]"Pegleg" Smith was a brother of the famous trapper, Jedediah Smith.
Footnote:
[1]"Pegleg" Smith was a brother of the famous trapper, Jedediah Smith.
The printing-press has sought many strange corners in the universe. It has, in these modern times, led rather than followed civilization. In the new West it usually is, first the printing-press, then the town.
One of the most peculiar phases of journalism is found in the desert region of California. There are, in the two great deserts of the State, four weekly papers, two in each desert. In the Mojave Desert are theRandsburg Miner, published in the gold-mining town of Randsburg, in the northern part of the desert, and theNeedles' Eye, issued from the town of Needles on the eastern confines of the sandy waste.
The Needles is the metropolis of the upper desert country, and theNeedles' Eyeis the larger of the two papers published in this desert. The town has a peculiar history, inasmuch as in the first fifteen years of itsexistence it stood upon borrowed ground. In size the township is one and a half times as large as the State of Vermont. The village of Needles is about eight miles west of the Colorado River on the line of the Santa Fé Railroad. The main part of the village is situated upon Section 29 of the township, which is one of the sections included in the railway grant to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The town grew naturally about the station, which was established at the time of the building of the Santa Fé road, and little thought was given to titles at that time.
In time the town grew to the dignity of brick blocks, and still the titles remained with the railway company. Some ineffectual efforts were made on one or two occasions to secure titles to the lands from the railway people, but it was not until 1903 that a deal was made whereby the townsmen, in consideration of $43,000, secured deeds to the lands upon which stand their homes and business blocks.
Needles has a population of two thousand souls. It is a mine outfitting town, furnishing supplies for a large and rich gold-mining district north of that locality. TheNeedles' Eye, which is an eight-page journal, is a wide-awake organ owned, printed, and edited by L. V. Root, a native of Michigan, but a resident of the Southwest since 1892. He formerly edited theNew Mexico Gleanerand is familiar with frontier journalism. His paper is devoted to the local interests of the town and to the mining districts of that region.
YEAR-OLD WILLOW TREES AT INTERNATIONAL LINEYEAR-OLD WILLOW TREES AT INTERNATIONAL LINE
Randsburg is a typical mining town with desert accessories. It is the chief town of the gold-mining district known as the "American Rand," and has but one rival in the district, Johannesburg, which is close to it in size and importance, but which has not yet arrived at the dignity of a newspaper.
TheMineris a four-page weekly devoted to the news of the mines and to local items. It has few features of interest outside the locality in which it is published.
In the Colorado Desert journalism attains an unusual degree of uniqueness. Both papers published in that region are printed below the level of the sea.
TheSubmarinehas the distinction of being the first paper in the world to be printed below the level of the sea. It is still unique in that it is the "lowest down" of any paper in the world. In order to hold this record the editor and proprietor, Randolph R. Freeman, was obliged to move to a new locality a fewmonths after establishing his paper in the desert.
In 1900, the first paper to be printed below sea-level was issued by Freeman at Indio, a station in the desert on the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Indio has a depression of twenty-two feet below the level of the sea.
Later, the Imperial irrigation canal was started across the desert from the Colorado River, and the town of Imperial had its birth. Then thePresssprang into existence and was printed in an office situated sixty-five feet below the ocean's level. TheSubmarinethus lost double prestige, for it was no longer the only paper published below the level of the sea, neither was it the "most low down newspaper on earth," as the publisher announced in his prospectus.
The editor, in informing his readers of his move, did so in the following language:
"We have dropped from twenty-two feet below sea-level to seventy-six feet below sea-level. We hit Coachella with a dull yet raucous thud. The low, rumbling noise you heard last Tuesday was caused by our printing-office taking the drop. It may be truly said that theSubmarineis the lowest down, or the lowdownest, or the most low down newspaper on earth. As nearly as we can compute the distance, Hades is about two hundred and twelve feet just below our new office. The paperwill continue to advocate the interests of all the country below sea-level and we want you to fire in all the news you know."
"We have dropped from twenty-two feet below sea-level to seventy-six feet below sea-level. We hit Coachella with a dull yet raucous thud. The low, rumbling noise you heard last Tuesday was caused by our printing-office taking the drop. It may be truly said that theSubmarineis the lowest down, or the lowdownest, or the most low down newspaper on earth. As nearly as we can compute the distance, Hades is about two hundred and twelve feet just below our new office. The paperwill continue to advocate the interests of all the country below sea-level and we want you to fire in all the news you know."
TheSubmarineis nothing if not consistent. It is an eight-page weekly, printed upon paper of a "submarine blue" tint. Its local paragraphs are run under the caption of "Along the Coral Strand." It has a humorous department conducted by "McGinty," the man who fell to the bottom of the sea. There is still another department entitled, "The Undertow." The editor owns a span of fine horses, the names of which are "Sub" and "Marine." In fact there is a flavor of the locality in everything connected with the establishment.
The ImperialPress, owned, edited, and published by Edgar F. Howe, is conducted strictly on journalistic principles. The paper is somewhat larger than theSubmarine. It is an eight-page weekly devoted to the interests of irrigation and of reclamation of the desert lands, and to general and local news.
Howe has been connected with various California newspapers, and has a wide reputation as a commercial editor and an oil expert. He confesses that the Imperial publishing business has introduced him to decidedly new experiences. One of the chief difficulties in printinga paper in so torrid a region is that it frequently occurs that the ink-rollers melt and the paper is delayed from issuing till other rollers can be obtained from Los Angeles, nearly three hundred miles away. Summer temperature in Imperial ranges from 100 to 120 degrees in the shade and from 20 to 30 degrees higher in the sun. A double set of rollers is kept on hand when possible, but it frequently happens that rollers collapse about as fast as they can be adjusted, and the paper is hung up till a new lot gets in, or till the weather cools off a bit.
Howe has a device of his own invention for the keeping of the rollers when not in actual use. It is a cupboard with a ventilator in the top and a box of sawdust in the bottom. The rollers are set in a rack midway. The sawdust is kept wet, and the rapid evaporation keeps the cupboard moderately cool.
In one feature thePressandSubmarineare peculiar. Each of the papers has a circulation three or four times larger than the entire population of the towns in which the papers are published. Another feature not common with rural publications is that all subscriptions are paid in advance and in cash. There are no delinquent subscribers, for the paper isstopped when the subscription expires. Neither are subscriptions payable in cordwood, for that is a commodity unknown to desert towns.
Twelve miles north of Imperial, and near the end of the Imperial canal, there was completed, January 1, 1903, a single board building twelve by sixteen feet. When the writer visited the place in the following June he found thirty-six buildings completed and others in the course of construction. This was the town of Brawley, one hundred and twenty-five feet below sea-level. One of the first objects to greet his eye was a printing outfit, the presses, cases, and accoutrements being stacked upon the sands beside a street of the town and near a tent in which resided the owner of the outfit. This was the nucleus of a new newspaper, to be started as soon as a building could be erected for its occupancy. This paper is destined to be the "lowdownest," unless one of the other papers moves still deeper into the great sink. It is among the possibilities of the future to have a paper published three hundred feet below sea-level, for this depression may be reached in the center of the basin known as the "Salton Sink."
There must be, we are told, an end to everything, and the beginning of the end of the desert is at hand. Already two hundred thousand acres of the great Colorado Desert has been taken from it and placed with the productive acreage of the State.
This is but a fraction, to be sure, of the vast amount of arid land in the State and but about one five-hundredth part of the arid area in the United States, but it is a beginning, and when it is considered that it is the work of only two years it will be conceded that it is a marvelous beginning.
Irrigation, to be sure, is not new to the Western country, but reclamation on a gigantic scale is new. Farming was carried on by irrigation in the West before the first white man visited this continent. In Arizona and New Mexico are to be traced to-day vast irrigation canals and reservoirs used by a race that had been forgotten when the first white man visited the region. Some of these ancient canals are now being used by both Indians and white men in those Territories.
IRRIGATING DESERT LANDIRRIGATING DESERT LAND
The national irrigation idea had its birth in Los Angeles in 1890, when the business men of that city met and opened a campaign for securing a Government system. Nearly six thousand letters were written and mailed to representative men of the country with the result that the idea took root and national irrigation became an accomplished fact.
Before the Government passed laws whereby irrigation became a national charge, private enterprise had taken hold of the matter, and the Imperial canal had been started out into the Colorado Desert. This canal has had marvelous development, and two years from the time work was begun upon it more lands had been reclaimed than by any other single irrigation system in the world.
The work of reclaiming the Colorado Desert was begun in 1900. Not far from the Mexican line, at Hanlon's Crossing, the river left a convenient place for the headworks of the great canal. Here is where the river was tapped. About a mile from the headworks the river, which in the bygone ages laid down the sixty-mile barrier between the gulf and the desert,also left a channel whereby to aid in reclaiming the desert. The first ten miles of this natural channel required some deepening, and then for some sixty miles across the Mexican border and back to the international line the canal was ready-made.
From the point where the canal leaves the Colorado to where it returns to the international line, after circling through Mexican territory, there is a fall of one hundred and fifteen feet, less than two feet to the mile. This, however, is sufficient for the purposes of irrigation.
One of the first questions to be settled, when the project for leading the river out into the desert was considered, was the character of the water. Not all water found in the arid regions is good for irrigation. Much of it is so impregnated with alkali as to be injurious rather than helpful to the soil.
The University of Arizona made daily analysis of the waters of the river for a period of seventeen months. This analysis showed that the waters contained no injurious substances, but, on the contrary, much that is nutritive to the soil.
DESERT SORGHUMDESERT SORGHUM
The waters of the Colorado carry in suspension one-fourth of one per cent. of solid matter. The color of the water is about like that of lemonade. The analysis shows that this matter in suspension is composed of clay, lime, phosphoric acid, available potash, and nitrogen. The fertilizing value of these substances is about 25 cents per acre-inch of water. As from twenty-four inches to thirty-six inches of water are used in the course of the year for each acre irrigated, it will be seen that the fertilizing value of the water is from $6 to $9 per acre per year. This means that the land will never wear out but will produce abundant crops so long as worked and irrigated.
Another question which came up for settlement was the permanence of the water-supply. The answer to this was equally satisfactory. The mean flow of the river is found to be forty thousand cubic feet per second, an amount of water ample to irrigate territory eight times as large as the Colorado Desert.
The volume of water in the lower Colorado River is greater in the summer, or dry season, than in the winter, or rainy season. This is because the river has its source in the great mountainous region in the north, where the melting snows on the mountain-tops during the summer season furnish large quantities of water to the streams which make up the river.This brings the greatest amount of water at the season of the year when the farmers use the most, a condition most satisfactory to the projectors of the irrigation system.
The main canal, which was begun in 1900, at the beginning of 1903 had grown to be one hundred miles long. This canal is seventy feet wide and eight feet deep, and supplies more than three hundred miles of lateral canals with water. The first season that water was turned into the canal, six thousand five hundred acres of crops were raised where for ages had been nothing but barren desert lands. The second season forty thousand acres were raised, and at the end of the season one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of land had been broken ready for seeding.
The great sandy wastes have given way to green fields of waving grain, verdant seas of billowy maize and millet, broad meadows of rich green alfalfa, and wide pastures where thousands of cattle dot the plain. In addition to this, new cities are springing up where desolation so recently reigned, and a railroad has crept down toward the Mexican line, and is destined to go on to the line and over, even to the great gulf which ages ago retreated from the land now being turned into a paradise.
MILO MAIZE ON RECLAIMED DESERT LAND NEAR HEBERMILO MAIZE ON RECLAIMED DESERT LAND NEAR HEBER
One of the first towns a man hears of now, when he enters the desert region, is Calexico, the most remote of the settlements in the desert north of the Mexican line. It is noted for two things, both of which have to do with the hotel, one of the half-dozen buildings which compose the town. When the visitor steps from the train at Old Beach, in the very heart of the desert, he is apt to be greeted with this question:
"Going down to Calexico?
"Waal, ye'll git the best meal there of any place in the desert, an' they've got a shower-bath at the hotel there, too," is the information vouchsafed when the visitor announces Calexico as his destination.
These are the things which have given Calexico fame. It was nine o'clock in the evening when the writer and his party arrived at Calexico in June, 1903, after a two-days drive across the dusty, burning plain.
"This way," said the landlord who answered our hail, showing us into a side room in the adobe structure. "Drop your luggage here. You can wash over there. And right in here," said he, proudly pointing the way, "is a shower-bath. Help yourselves."
A shower-bath in the very heart of the desert! It is no wonder the landlord is proud ofit, for there is not another within two hundred miles.
Calexico is a town with a future,—like most of the desert towns,—in fact, it is nearly all future as yet. It has streets and public squares, but it lacks the buildings. They will follow, however, for the railroad is coming, and a rich farming region will center there. The town is laid out beside the irrigation canal which there forms a portion of the international boundary.
Over this ditch, in Mexico, is the embryo town of Mexicala, which consists of a single row of thatched huts and adobes strung along beside the canal. Nearly every building is a saloon or gambling den, or both. The town boasts of a population of three hundred souls, with but a single white man.
None of the towns in the Imperial country on this side of the line sell intoxicating liquors. This makes Mexicala the Mecca for the "spirituously" inclined. The liquor obtainable there is of a brand known as mescal, and there is murder in every glass. In proof of this assertion, just before we arrived there a Mexican took four drinks and then shot four persons.
ADOBE HOTEL, CALEXICO, WHICH HAS THE ONLY SHOWER BATH IN THE DESERTADOBE HOTEL, CALEXICO, WHICH HAS THE ONLY SHOWER BATH IN THE DESERT
Silsbee, twelve miles north of Calexico, is a very young city. There are three or four tents among the mesquites which border Blue Lake, and there is a general store, post-office, and dwelling combined. The building, as well as the business thereof, is composite. It is made partly of boards, partly of tent cloth, and partly of poles, thatched with greasewood boughs. The proprietor of the establishment, Dan Browning, is a red-faced frontiersman who has faith in the future of his city, and he is in on the ground floor. He will point out to the visitor "Main Street," "the park," "the hotel site," and other attractions, and he sees them all in his mind's eye. To the visitor, however, all these metropolitan wonders appear to be simply desert.
Imperial has the one church of the desert. It is a small wooden structure—the first wooden building in the valley—which is whitewashed on the outside. Imperial is ancient. It has two years the start of its sister towns and it looks down upon them with disdain. Some of the infant cities have designs upon their big sister, however, and they mean to outstrip her in the near future. Brawley is one of these ambitious towns. Heber is another and Holten is still another.
Plans have been perfected for the construction of a grand boulevard which will pass from the northern limit of the Imperial canal systemto the international line at Calexico. This street will be one of the wonders of the State when completed. It is to be one hundred feet wide and thirty-five miles long, and will be so level that it cannot be determined with the eye which way the street inclines.
Along either side of the way and down through the center of the thoroughfare will be rows of trees to shut off from the street the glare of the desert sun. Also on either side will be small canals of running water which will serve, not only to irrigate the trees but will be utilized to lay the dust of the street. When completed it will require but two men to keep the entire street in order.
With this glimpse of the work of reclamation which is taking place in the desert thus afforded the reader, I will drop the subject and bring the final chapter to an end. The death of the desert will be a beautiful one. There will be no lack of flowers to lay upon its bier. Its grimness and fierceness and terrors will have given place to peace, plenty, and prosperity. The region of death will be transformed into a kingdom of life.
Old PathsandLegends of New England
With many Illustrations of Massachusetts Bay, Old Colony, Rhode Island, and the Providence Plantations, and the Fresh River of the Connecticut Valley
ByKatherine M. Abbott
8o, very fully illustrated, net. $3.50. (By mail, $3.75.)
The idea for this book grew out of the fact that Miss Abbott's little paper-boundTrolley Trips, describing the old New England neighborhoods that may now be reached by the trolley, have met with an astonishingly wide demand. In this more pretentious work Miss Abbott has utilized her fund of material to draw a delightful picture of the quaint byways of New England. But in this case her wanderings are not limited by gaps in the trolley circuit, or by daylight or car-fares. Historic spots of national interest, curious or charming out-of-the-way places, Indian legends and Yankee folk-lore find full justice in Miss Abbott's entertaining pages. Fiction could never interpret New England so honestly as does this volume.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONSNew York——London
The Romance of the Colorado River